The Best Laid Plans
by Pantomime Banjo
Summary: Oneshot for Unknown Variable. Lovino always knew that his work was dangerous, but then again, everything around him was.


So, despite some huge delays, I finally filled my first request. -confetti-

Prompt: Conflict between Conquistador!Spain and Mafia!Romano

Bonus: Dark!super-Catholic!Italy, who is totally not with Germany. Ever.

Warnings: **Violence**, language

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The dust and smoke clouding the air would have choked him just as soon as he opened the door if he hadn't already known how disgusting the place got. Lovino was one person who definitely understood how seedy back rooms came to be a cliché, and he knew just as well that the sight of him wandering in as he was, looking to be no more than twenty and dressed in a simple t-shirt and khaki shorts, would break the hearts of doe-eyed romanticists everywhere. He looked nothing like Marlin Brando, and the very idea of Hollywood mobsters in _his_ town would have been laughable if they weren't sitting in front of and around him, most too occupied with their business and games to pay him any mind.

None of the goons recognized him; more than one silver-haired baby in a self-righteous suit shot him a dirty look. The combination of his dress and attitude confused them, he knew, and he took some pleasure in the bewilderment he could plainly see through their disdain. After all, he was _L'Italia Romano_, and there was absolutely no reason for him to care what they thought. Their great-grandchildren would be long since dead before he even seemed to age a year, and he'd been winning at this game since before they'd even been thought of. "_Ciao_," he whispered almost playfully into the ear of a Frenchman as he vanished behind a mirror hung flush against the wall.

After pulling the entrance shut, the Italian sauntered over to a table butted up against the far wall, trying not to remember the first time he'd seen another nation in the room. The dim light was far enough removed from the spot that he could be almost completely hidden in shadow in his favorite position, behind the chair facing the north wall. Just where the bastard humans he and his brother had thought to trick had hidden their spy.

"_It seems you owe my friends here a debt, _Liebe,_" Ludwig called from the shadows. "They're not very pleased with you." _

"Cazzo_," Lovino had spat, feeling the gun at the base of his skull. "We had to pick Germans to fleece _after_ you pissed him off.."_

"Lass verloren, checca_," Feliciano ordered harshly. "I told you I'm not wasting my time with you anymore."_

An American gun found its way into his left hand from God only knows where. "I wonder what Alfred would think of us playing with his things like this," Lovino mused quietly. He guessed that the blond would be upset that they weren't dressed like Coppola had ordered, but regardless, a .38 Special was almost too perfect for his little date with Antonio. The don fingered the barrel of the revolver, smiling maniacally at the lack of any safety catches preventing him from unloading six rounds into himself, the wall, his brother, and checked to make sure it was loaded properly. He wasn't about to waste his time _un_loading a gun with so much on the line, like always.

_Ludwig clucked in disapproval. Sometimes, the two brothers decided silently, he still seemed like 1941. "That's too bad, and here I was going to ask them to let you go." The two fumed silently, slowly heating the metal of the many weapons pressed into their flesh as the blond choked something out in his pig-language and retreated to a corner of the room._

_Almost instantly, a pale arm reached around Lovino's head as though its owner had somehow known he had an escape ready to press another gun just where the captive could make out the tiny letters reading "Smith & Wesson" if he crossed his eyes._

It was best not to keep his former caretaker waiting once he showed up, even if the bastard was already beyond fashionably late. Lovino himself had only wandered in two hours past the meeting time from that first day, and he was truly beginning to appreciate his station after the first twenty minutes alone in the room. Nobody else dared to keep him waiting anymore.

Apparently Spain would be an exception to everything in his life.

_Their tardiness had, evidently, given the Germans time to plot, and Feliciano, for one, was glad to have known already that the man he'd rejected so long ago for his religion was an incorrigible sadist. It seemed to make the horrors the men hidden around the room inflicted upon the pair just the least bit more bearable._

The second twenty minutes added a second bullet to the mix.

_Lovino, however, only remembered the Nazi's preferences after he saw some of the tools pulled out from otherwise innocuous cases and bags to use on his _fratellino_ and himself. The knowledge worried him all the more, and he tried to relieve his stress over the situation through a few of his usual profane tirades._

"Where the fuck is he?" The third.

_The flaying of his right hand shut him up right quick, though, and he began to convince himself that neither God nor Antonio could ever save him. No matter what they'd promised._

_Feliciano's laughter just convinced him that someone completely different from who the "cheerful" Italian praised constantly had come to his aid._

_At least it was something._

Somewhere near another hour later, the southern half of the Apennine Peninsula heard faint chaos in the bar out front and wondered just how much hell his former caretaker was raising. The answer came in the form of a familiar battleaxe crashing through the northern wall of the room, splintering the painted plywood that had patched an old hole in the stone wall with an ease that caused its owner to nearly fall flat on the floor.

"_Roma_," he greeted, the panic in his eyes glinting as they searched the room desperately.

_He only had skin on his thumb by the time Antonio managed to break through the thick walls. Axes weren't, after all, made for anything harder than wood or bone, and Lovino had built the room with the expectation of an attack by technology more advanced than that of his newly-christened bodyguard's youth._

_The disfiguration hadn't deterred Ludwig any, however; when the younger man had noticed that his former ally took the torture in stride, far surpassing the worst of anything he'd protected the Italian from, he managed to call off the thugs to take a different route. One more psychologically-based._

_One that saw Feliciano struggling and screaming as his older brother's clothes had been cut simply and efficiently from his body with a knife, used then to merely tie his wrists thoroughly, arms stretched above his head._

_The Spaniard paused for a moment to catch his breath once the room was revealed to him, but not for any exertion. He'd spent himself infinitely more fighting Brits and Turks alike; the sight of two naked men in the middle of the room had simply caught him completely off his guard._

_Especially given that one was the lover he'd promised his life to and the other a good friend._

"_A bello_," Lovino answered almost coquettishly, quickly catching the intruder's attention. Any hesitation in revealing himself would only leave him with the same fate as the wall; the very infatuation that had drawn the psychopath to find him there in the first place would only keep him safe if it was known. "Why don't you take a seat." It wasn't a question, and although the wave to the seat across the table was casual, the threat behind it broke Antonio out of his reverie and prompted him to sit where he was told without question, leaning his weapon against the wall almost casually once he'd decided that they were alone.

"Before you even say anything, shut up. You came here for this, so you can go first." The Italian slid the gun across the table to his guest and leaned back rest his feet on the table, intentionally leaving himself almost defenseless.

_Humans dropped like flies when faced with a nation in battle, and Germany's friends were certainly no exception. The dozen of them met Spain's ax and the floor before even its wielder fully understood what was happening, and then his attention centered on the man scrambling to his feet with a knife pressed to Romano's neck._

"Whatever you say, Lovi," he mumbled, picking the revolver up and resting it against his temple. Calloused fingers took their time, squeezing the trigger deliberately.

"_You'll drop that right now if you want to die quickly, _Alemania_," the eldest warned, his voice barely more than a growl. "No amount of love for your brother will earn you mercy now."_

Silence.

_The knife dropped, though Feliciano's reflexes saved it and had it through his brother's restrains in an instant; Lovino was freed just as Ludwig was thrown into the far wall._

"Give it here."

"Spagna_," a soft tenor cooed. "Might I see him for a moment first?"_

"Claro que sí_." The German was allowed to slump to the ground for a breath._

_Then he was shown just how much Feliciano had learned from him over the years._

A soft thud as the weapon landed in his hands.

_Lovino was mildly astounded that Ludwig was still alive once his brother had finished with him, but sure enough, the screams, moans, and pleads that Antonio drew out of him for the next few hours proved the miracle._

_Maybe the prayers for redemption Feliciano had carved into his flesh were actually doing something besides bleeding._

The Italian smirked to himself, easily summoning the mask he needed for work, and licked his lips. He knew Antonio would be scrutinizing him once his turn came; he didn't bother worrying about drawing the ex-conquistador's attention as the short barrel slipped between his lips like so many other things had for just the same purpose.

_Nobody had known that there were fourteen humans on the thoroughly decimated opposing side. Italy was unable to see; Spain didn't care enough to count; and Germany was too occupied with his revenge to note their comings and goings._

His savior had learned quickly what that mouth could do, but that was then, and now, the spectacle was just another effort to protect his protector.

_The damage the two dealt to Antonio was fantastic; Feliciano later proposed that they may have actually been Brandenburg and Bavaria, come to help their brother._

_Lovino didn't care then; he was too busy waiting to learn if the only person who had ever actually cared about him was a vegetable. _

_Feliciano kindly went back to pretending that the pair weren't homosexual and wandered off to visit his wife, who conveniently dwelled within his borders._

He wasn't sure how he felt about that,

so he pulled the trigger.

_When Antonio woke up, he seemed completely fine._

_On the fifth anniversary of the "incident," the flashbacks started._

Silence.

_Only finishing what the Germans had started could stop him._

The scraping of metal on wood.

_Lovino had found that out the hard way, when Antonio hadn't noticed until too late who he was attacking._

_Feliciano had killed him that first time._

A bang, and the wet patter of blood on wood, stone, flesh.

_Vaguely remembering a book Alfred told him about once, the elder insisted on controlling his _novio_ himself from then on with a bullet in his brain every fifth year._

"_Buenas noches, idiota_," Lovino grumbled, leaning over the table to place a kiss on his _Spagna_'s forehead, despite the gore, between his eyes, which were slowly fading into an icy blue. "Maybe someday you'll remember that it's over."

_He only managed it a half dozen times. From then on he found "better" ways, though he spent every other anniversary of the date agonizing over the manipulation._

Letting out a long sigh that disturbed the smoke leaking into the room from the hole in the wall, he fished for his phone in the pocket of his shorts and quickly reached his brother. Feliciano probably liked helping him move Toño somewhere he could clean him off even less than he liked remembering what the man was to his brother, but it was far beyond them to leave a debt unpaid.

Translations:

L'Italia Romano (Italian): Roman Italy

Ciao (Italian): Hey/Bye

Liebe (German): Dear

Cazzo (Italian): Fuck

Lass verloren, checca (German, Italian): Get lost, pansy

Fratellino (Italian): Little brother

Roma (Spanish): Rome

A bello (Italian): Hey, sexy

Alemania (Spanish): Germany

Spagna (Italian): Spain

Claro que sí (Spanish): By all means

Novio (Spanish): Lover/boyfriend

Buenas noches, idiota (Spanish, Italian): Good night, idiot

Notes:

what Romano didn't look like: http:/ tinyurl. com/ 592cud

.38 Special: http:/ tinyurl. com/ 6ws2jxl

-just the picture: http:/ tinyurl. com/ 7brmwgp

Italy's wife: http:/ tinyurl. com /efjtp

America's book: /368uzj


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